The Cranberries Were the Ultimate Teen Soundtrack Band

Cranberries songwriters Dolores O’Riordan and Noel Hogan turned 20 the year they recorded “Linger” for the first time. It was 1990, the band was still going by the cumbersome moniker the Cranberry Saw Us, and the composition appeared on a humble demo cassette called Water Circle. A polished version of “Linger” peaked at No. 8 on the Hot 100 around Valentine’s Day of 1994, making the Cranberries international stars and establishing their niche: dreamy, ruminative songs of infatuation and uncertainty, delivered with maximum drama.

While they never sounded callow, there was an unmistakable youthfulness to the college-aged band’s earliest and most popular albums, 1993’s Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? And 1994’s No Need to Argue. There is something quintessentially teenage about the conflicted romances of “Linger” and in particular, “Dreams,” both shifting constantly from admissions of love to anxieties about heartbreak and back.

As Stephen Thomas Erlewine noted in Pitchfork’s obituary for O’Riordan, who died suddenly this week, the Cranberries became ubiquitous on film and TV in the mid-’90s. Although the music industry’s eagerness to monetize soundtracks during those years helps to explain the phenomenon, what’s fascinating is how many memorable appearances the band’s songs made in some of the most enduring teen movies and shows of the decade. Here’s a brief look back at that history, which continues into the present.

“Dreams” in “My So-Called Life” (1994)

If there’s a definitive dramatization of what it was like to grow up in the early ’90s, it’s “My So-Called Life.” A moody collage of teen angst, conflicted sexuality, and boys with pretty hair, it spun grunge-era salvos about individualism into primetime drama. Alt-rock soundtracked practically every movie and TV show aimed at young, white audiences during those years, but music was more than a backdrop for Claire Danes’ Angela Chase—it was a spirit guide, leading her from good grades and prissy friends to romance, adventure, and reckless pattern mixing.

Of course the Cranberries would have a place on a show whose heroine is a thoughtful girl desperate to liberate her real self. Angela is lying in bed, blasting “Dreams,” midway through episode three, as she wallows in humiliation over the false rumor that she slept with her sort-of boyfriend, Jordan Catalano (Jared Leto). “You might as well turn it off,” she snarls when her mom (Bess Armstrong) tries to lower the volume. “Dreams” evokes first love and broadening horizons, the steady clip of its riffs and O’Riordan’s expansive croon tempered by lyrics that are at once exhilarating and fearful. These are universal feelings, evidenced by the fact that “Dreams” has since appeared in other coming-of-age touchstones, like “Beverly Hills, 90210,” “Gossip Girl,” and “Smallville.”

“Linger” in Camp Nowhere (1994)

Camp Nowhere is not exactly a “My So-Called Life”-level classic. But if you were a tween in the summer of 1994, it was a movie you were nonetheless required to watch in a sticky mall multiplex, surrounded by ten of your closest friends. Along with providing a vicarious sleepaway camp experience for kids stuck at home, it featured crush-worthy leads like Jonathan Jackson, Marnette Patterson, and Andrew Keegan, as well as scenes of Lord of the Flies-lite anarchy.

The soundtrack, at least, was a relatively inspired mix of new alternative (Live, Velvet Crush) and older tracks by artists ranging from Fishbone to Eddie Cochran. In a scene that now seems calculated to melt seventh-grade girls’ hearts, Keegan’s sophomoric Zack exhibits some personal growth, comforting a homesick kid by promising to make jewelry with her as “Linger” plays. It’s not the perfect sync for the moment, but it does start to make sense when Patterson’s preppy princess Trish overhears their conversation and is touched by Zack’s maturity. (The scene starts about 57 minutes into the movie, which you can watch on HBO Go.)

“Away” in Clueless (1995)

Cher (Alicia Silverstone) wants her new protégé, Tai (Brittany Murphy), to date their handsome, popular classmate Elton (Jeremy Sisto). But Elton, a snob who thinks he’s too good for Tai, is obviously into Cher. He is also into the Cranberries. “I can’t find my Cranberries CD,” he announces in the middle of class. “I gotta go to the quad before somebody snags it.”

It’s just an excuse to leave the room, but Elton’s love of the band is real. During an awkward ride home from a party, he plays their plaintive “Away” and warbles along with his eyes fixed on Cher. (This is just before he repeatedly tries to kiss her, then strands her in the Valley in an Alaïa dress. Asshole.) A B-side to the European “Zombie” single, “Away” is a deep cut that didn’t appear on the platinum-sellingClueless soundtrack. But the song’s inclusion in the greatest teen movie of its time, alongside such era-defining tracks as Supergrass’ “Alright” and Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees,” is a testament to the Cranberries’ central place in mid-’90s youth culture.

“Liar” and “How” in Empire Records (1995)

“Sinead O’Rebellion!” Renée Zellweger’s bubbly Gina crows to her record-store coworker Debra (Robin Tunney) in one of Empire Records’ many quotable exchanges. “Shock me, shock me, shock me with that deviant behavior!” Deb is a snarling, suicidal misery chick who has just cut all her hair off in the shop’s bathroom, and she really does look like Sinead O’Connor. But she also kind of resembles O’Connor’s countrywoman O’Riordan in her shaved-head period.

Perhaps that connection only presents itself because, in another scene, the Cranberries’ disillusioned, combative “Dreams” B-side “Liar” becomes Deb’s anthem as she hands out homemade buttons to her coworkers that say things like “stupid” and “Mark sucks.” It’s not the band’s only appearance in the movie, either. “How,” a noisy, somewhat overlooked song of betrayal from Everybody Else Is Doing It, telegraphs prim Cory’s (Liv Tyler) anger after a tryst with her childhood dreamboat, Rex Manning (Maxwell Caulfield), goes south. Empire Records is no Clueless, but it has become one of the most fondly remembered teen cult movies of its era—thanks, in part, to a soundtrack that split the difference between radio-friendly alt rock and more obscure tracks that could have played in an independent record store circa 1995.

“Dreams” in “Derry Girls” (2018)

The Cranberries’ hits have gotten plenty of syncs since the mid-’90s, often as objects of comfort and nostalgia for characters who would be in their thirties now. In the latest season of “You’re the Worst,” Gretchen (Aya Cash) howls the chorus of “Zombie” in the middle of a breakdown. A 2013 episode of “Don’t Trust the B---- in Apartment 23” includes the revelation that “Linger” is one character’s lifelong breakup song.

But the band’s greatest recent TV appearance was in the very first moments of "Derry Girls," a biting teen comedy that premiered just a few weeks ago on the UK’s Channel 4 (and isn’t hard for resourceful Americans to watch). The show is set at a girls’ high school in Northern Ireland in 1994, when the region’s decades-long fight for independence from Britain was still raging. The Cranberries wrote a wrenching protest song about that violent period with “Zombie,” but it’s “Dreams” that plays over a shot of a military truck patrolling the green hills of Londonderry in the series’ opening scene. A generation after “My So-Called Life,” it isn’t just a period-appropriate music cue—it also remains a perfect, bittersweet teen anthem.